In the coming days, eulogies will wax poetic. Paterno will be lauded as having been far more than a football coach.

He’ll be lionized for altering the trajectories of so many young lives for the better. And a gnawing emptiness in so many hearts will yearn for all those golden Saturday afternoons in autumn when it was just a game.

Yet, even during these black-armband days, debates will swirl.

All-powerful Paterno didn’t do enough for the one young boy who needed him most: the 10-year-old allegedly abused in the football locker room showers by a former assistant coach.

Sure, Paterno dutifully reported the alleged 2002 incident involving former defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky up the university’s hierarchy. But it was a hierarchy over which Paterno unofficially presided. And the cerebral coach, meticulous in so many things, never followed up.

In the end, nothing was done. And more boys were allegedly abused.

In the scandal’s wake, Joe Paterno called it one of the “great sorrows of [his] life” that he didn’t do more.

Paterno would be diagnosed with lung cancer on the day his beloved team played its first game without him, the sorrowful home finale at Beaver Stadium vs. Nebraska.

Paterno’s family announced his illness the following Friday, a day before the Lions would be eliminated from the first Big Ten championship, losing a chance for the league trophy that briefly bore Paterno’s name.

And now, little more than two months after he was fired, Joe Paterno is gone, his death completing a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.